The ice cream parlor/restaurant Bon Boniere, a longtime institution on the Arcata Plaza, abruptly closed up shop and said goodbye yesterday.
Owner Kellen Moore, who took over the business in 2001 with several partners, is not leaving the ice cream business completely; her staff will still be selling ice cream cones and sandwiches out of Bon Boniere’s Old Town Eureka location. And the business is not leaving Arcata entirely; its ice cream production facility is in the Foodworks Culinary Center in Arcata’s Aldergrove Industrial Park.
Moore said she decided to focus on just one operation, and, after crunching some numbers, determined that the Eureka location was more profitable. She explained that three of the four owners are currently working on degrees in non-ice cream related areas and the time it took to run two businesses was getting to be an issue. “It was a tough decision. We were still making money [in Arcata], but you have to look at the hours it takes – it becomes the quality of life issue. Life won.”
An educated guess would suggest that competition was coming from the new Ultimate Yogurt franchise distributorship shop on another corner of the Plaza and the very successful Arcata Scoop, winner in the “Best Ice Cream/Yogurt” category in this week’s Journal readers’ poll.
This article appears in The Rural Bar Crawl.
It’s a shame. I don’t expect the yogurt place to last more than a couple years. Arcata Scoop is cool if you’re a hipster, because hipsters NEED organic ice cream. The rest of us just lost an Arcata institution.
Yeah, let’s blame the yogurt place.
It can’t have anything to do with taxes and economic policy ravaging businesses around the country. I thought businesses were bad? Shouldn’t we celebrate another one closing? The government can now rent that space to do something important, like make it harder for other people to have businesses, and make sure taxes go up.
Arcata isn’t big enough for three frozen confectioneries. It’s that simple. In times of economic distress, these essentially unnecessary businesses do surprisingly well. Two such restaurants being located on the Plaza is a bit much for the impulse walk/drive-by audience, and much of the I-will-seek-out-handmade-ice-cream crowd switched from Bon Boniere to Arcata Scoop. With any luck, Bon Boniere will come back when these newcomers have dropped by the wayside.
Hate to see this business go – it was truly an after dinner treasure. As for Arcata being too small for three ice cream/yogurt shops (actually until yesterday there were four). All have distinctly different draws and ‘fan’ bases. I’m not loyal to any but I have patronized them all. Maybe if there were more people like me this could be more than a one-horse town…a three-scoop/swirl town.
Note to Bob – is Ultimate Yogurt actually a franchise? I recall reading an article about them stating they were not a franchise. Other than Subway, there are NO franchises in downtown Arcata.
Lorna, You raised a good point regarding my use of the word “franchise,’ which was perhaps inaccurate. A little research shows that Ultimate Yogurt Inc. has operations in Brookings and Crescent City in addition to two here in Humboldt County. What constitutes a “franchise” under Arcata “no new franchises” rules? I’ll have to check into that.
Business, especially food businesses come and go. It’s not any easy way to make a living and patrons are always looking for the new best thing. Returning to Hum Co after many years I found very few of the places that once existed (with the exception of the Wildflower Cafe).
RIP:
Plaza Gourmet
Epicurean
Red Pepper
Mojos
Garcias
Great Breakfast Place now occupied by the fabric store
Youngbergs
Pacific Rim Noodle House
Union Town Cafe
Jambalaya (bar-upscale restaurant)
Bob, if one owner owns three stores, it isn’t a franchise. If someone owns a store and sells the name, recipes, and business model and shares in a percentage of profits and sells its branded products to someone – that would be an example of a franchise.
Regarding franchises, my googling and Ann’s “three stores” comment: I just got off the phone with Melissa Hannan, who owns the Arcata and Eureka Ultimate Yogurt shops with her husband (turns out there are only two, not three or four). She’s from Humboldt, attended school in Eureka, but now lives in Brookings (her husband is from there), so they have a business office up there, but no yogurt shop. They briefly rented an office in Crescent City, and while the record lingers on the Net, that’s in the past. The upshot of all this is that it’s a family business, not a franchise at all and even “distributorship” is incorrect.
“Food businesses come and go” is an ignorant statement when it comes to a long-time business such as Bon Boniere. It wasn’t an inexperienced startup.
I’ve put in an application formerly “Bon Boniere” for a porno shop that specializes in Gay and Lesbian products. We should be open November 1.